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And so, it turns out that you can’t seem to find the time, let alone the energy, to go clubbing night after night anymore, what with trying to find a babysitter as well. And who can find the money these days? Somehow a quiet night in, chilling with the missus and a take-away in front of Stars In Their Eyes doesn»

Tick follows tock follows tick follows tock...
You just wish they would wake up one day and say “let’s explode!”
Or really do something. Or do nothing ever again. But like a space capsule gone astray and drifting further into the milky blackness; fainting, intermittent signals are still being rec»

“People say to me: ‘don’t have a go at Morrissey, he helped me get through my depression’. No he didn’t! YOU helped HIM get through HIS depression!”
~ Jerry Sadowitz
I sometimes wonder if The Smiths didn’t royally fuck things up for me. At least for a while there, during my typically English, angsty a»

For the immediate attention of anyone who closely cherishes Boo Radleys‘ ‘Everything’s Alright Forever’ and Stereolab‘s ‘Peng!’ albums and the first three exquisite Slowdive EPs.
The driving ‘Liebling’ sees Malmö four piece, The Radio Dept., come riding through a bl»

Old Gods nearly dead they may be, but Fleetwood Mac return, not so much to save guitar pop from the quagmire of timidity, homogeny and fear of evolution that it appears happy to flap around in, but to swish swiftly past towards - forever towards - some orange pastel smudge of a Californian sunset, towards the ne»

“You’re never gonna see me standing still
I’m never gonna stop ‘till I get my fill
It’s what you do that takes you far...
I’m not afraid to say I hear a different beat
Over and over, I get up again. Over and over... “
~ ‘Over and Over’, 1984.
You know that smell you get when you dr»

Disco!
DiscoDiscoDiscoDiscoDiscoDiscoDiscoDiscoDisco. D.I.S.C.O
Disco!
This isn’t a disco album by the way.
Not completely anyway. Not wholly or purely. Disco you see, is dark and sleek. Disco is desire. Disco is desperation. Disco is love unrequited. At times it is all jet planes and»

The cover looks like wallpaper which could invite comparison to its aural content. But no. For sure ‘Mmmnn‘ sounds as laid back as the title suggests, and about as complicated as blowing on a dandelion clock or watching vapour trails slowly fade into the azure, but since when were they ever bad things?
She»

This mini album by tartan rock/post-rock rockers, Cayto, is a wilfully eclectic messy mix of several styles. Desperate not to be pigeonholed they set about shifting constantly, leaving the listener either invigorated or exasperated. Bully for them, no reason why they should be constrained into any one particular»

Barry Egan is a sociaphobe whose life is going nowhere. He’s stuck in a dead-end job, suffers from stress and, despite having seven sisters, is literally petrified of women. His inability to communicate only compounds his isolation. His pent up frustration occasionally explodes in piques of destructive rage, and whe»

From Russia with a love that dare not speak it’s name (heterosexuality)(shh!), t.A.T.u, the - yes, here we go again - NAKED RUSSIAN TEENAGE LESBIANS SEXSEXSEX pop duo (hi Googlers!) have succeeded in doing what Drago failed to do in the classic cold-war satire that was ‘Rocky IV’; they have “krushed” the West in»

3:30 in the morning and still my mind won’t shut down, shut off, shut up, or do whatever it’s supposed to do. It just jabbers away to itself. So tired. I’m restless and agitated. Sleep won’t come. I get up. Pace the room.
Exhausted by my own shiftlessness, insomnia, boredom, loneliness, anxiety and just plain»

Like the voice from the walled up room at the end of the long dark corridor in a long abandoned house, these softly calling songs have an impossibly haunting resonance.
Curiously, they are the result of a side-project from an ex-Talk Talk bassist and the smoky-voiced chanteuse out of Portishead and t»

During one of the many radio interviews he took part in to promote this album and its accompanying single, ‘Like I Love You’, Justin Timberlake admitted to performing oral sex on his ex-girlfriend, Britney (no surname needed) during their supposedly true-love-waits style relationship.
Now, wit»

As natural as rain he dances again.
Pulling at his shirt, ducking and reeling across the stage, whip-cracking
the microphone lead, Morrissey is in full flow in this his 2002 ‘comback
special’
But the question is: is Morrissey still relevant? Ha, no. But then again, was he ever?
Morrisse»

Dark. Isn’t it?
Like a heavy, grey, wet blanket, winter has enveloped everything on this storm-lashed, sodden sod of earth of a country. Autumn doesn’t even get a look in anymore, no time for that, just bring on the rainclouds.
Yeah, bring ‘em on, we think.
It’s dark, we think. It’s cold and wet, we t»

So what does the new Saint Etienne album sound like?
First of all it isn’t “kitsch”, it isn’t “ironic”, it isn’t “frothy”, “lightweight” or “bubblegum” or any of those other terms that furrow-browed, sneer-lipped rock-crits like to wave Saint Etienne away with before going back to their serious, proper, canonical»

Well, by Christmas 1989 I had decided that John Squire was probably the coolest man in Britain, and, therefore, the world.
The album ‘The Stone Roses’ had sound-tracked my summer holidays and most of my Autumnal slog to school. And now here the band were on the front of the Xmas NME, on a mountain, a»

This year has seen Elvis have a critical rehabilitation, career revival and chart success. Trouble is, it’s the wrong Elvis.
Whilst weasel-eyed record company courtiers have once again propped the King’s corpse back up on it’s throne for the peasant’s to fawn before, has anyone noticed the return of the minstre»

Pitched somewhere between the buzzsaw urgency of Ash and the rain-swept dolefulness of Idlewild, ESP’s particular brand of solid, if unspectacular, melodic guitar pop seems destined to soundtrack Andrew Lincoln’s bicycle ride to work on a future episode of ‘Teachers’. And no doubt it is also echoing through many »

Hey! Do you yearn for a time in musical history where it seemed that raspy-throated blokey singers in bands that churned out great slabs of white-boy blues-rock were the norm? Do you wish for a musical climate where disco, hip-hop, dance, all electronic and synth based music, and even some punk had never happened?»

The very first time I heard this I thought I he was saying: “But tonight I’m coming out the closet”. Wow, if only. Then we would have something interesting on our hands, instead we merely get more of his godawful, bellicose blathering.
Anyone still interested in The Mathers Family on-going soap opera will k»

“Punk”, said Greil Marcus, “is where you find it”. I’m inclined to agree.
But then, of course, it all depends on where you look, and if you are looking to find where punk is right now, it wouldn’t make any sense to keep on looking in the same old places, it won’t be there anymore. If the tenet that punk is,»

David Gedge has a hard-on.
A hard-on for fast guitars, for enormous tunes.
But most of all he has a hard-on for sex.
Curious cove that Gedge fellow. The image of him as a mild-mannered, indie stalwart remains. A past-it Peel favourite. A relic from the ‘C-86’ scene. A musical coelacanth who has »

Where was I...?
I’ve always liked Jack for their songs about girls and drinking and drinking with girls and drinking because the girl had walked out (because of the drinking). And for the fact that the songs were about little else, as if little else mattered (it doesn’t) as if the subjects of girls and dri»

Shambling indie. Ambling, rambling indie. Baked beans on toast on the lap in front of Countdown indie. Just popping down to the corner shop for a Pot Mash and a bag of Nik-Naks indie. Asking the girl in Kwik Save if she would like to go out for a drink later but she smiles and says thanks but she’s going with her boyfr»

I’ve been watching ‘The Wicker Man’ a lot recently.
The reason being - other than having nothing else to do in my life - that it’s struck a kind of chord with me. I don’t know why, exactly, I’m not sure I want to know. But what I found interesting with it was the air of benign affability of the film’s isl»

HOMELANDS, Britain's premier dance music festival, returns this year on 1st June 2002, with what promises to be another excellent line-up
Despite the fact that controversial garage act So Solid Crew were forced to withdraw from the festival, following pressure from police, Homelands, now in »

Some time ago, somewhere in the West Midlands, in some nondescript Birmingham over-spill town, in some depressing seventies concrete block of a comprehensive, in some school room that over-looked the industrial estate which some of us would end up in, during some lesson or other, I would sit, surreptitiously listening »